Maybe it's a boy thing. After a Sunday afternoon spent out of sight of a television and out of earshot of a radio we were all suffering a little. Eventually two intrepid souls slipped away from the party and out to a car to catch the early evening sports news. With salvation close at hand, the jittery mood instantly became more relaxed and we waited patiently for deliverance.
When one of them returned with that terrifically self-confident air unique to those in possession of sports results that you don't have, the babble of questions that greeted him was only about one thing. ["]What about the Grand Prix?["] ["] How did Irvine do?["] ["]And what about Hakkinen?["]
Never mind your All Ireland hurling quarter-finals or, perish the thought, the British Seniors golf, Formula One and more particularly Irvine were the only thing on the assembled minds. Boys, very evidently, will be boys.
Eddie Irvine. It has been coming for a while but now, all of a sudden, he seems to have become the pre-eminent sporting figure in this country. He is certainly the only Irishman or woman who is currently stamping him or herself all over their particular sport. Maybe that will all change with the second coming of Sonia but for now Irvine is pretty much all we have.
Last Sunday's Austrian Grand Prix felt like the beginning of a myth. And if Irvine does go on to win this year's World Championship we will all look back to that hour and a half on the A1 Ring as the time when it started to happen. The way the victory was achieved had that unmistakable air of greatness about it. In the days running up to the race Irvine looked like a haunted man and after Saturday's emasculated final practice, ritual humiliation for the new Ferrari number one looked inevitable. This would have been one fitting end to his overleaping ambition. Everyone loves it when a proud man falls.
But Irvine seems to operate on a different plane. Even though few were listening when he said that practice times would mean little when it came to race day, this is precisely how he played it and the win was as much a triumph for his mental toughness and application as it was for his innate driving ability.
He is a strange mixture. Any journalists who have spent time in his company will know that he is capable of mixing unspeakable rudeness and off-handedness with a winning way that would charm the little birds off the trees. Often these two sides of his character can surface in the space of one short encounter and anyone on the receiving end is generally left a bit bewildered. You finish up thinking that on balance you probably like him but when you start to think about it you can't find a single reason why.
Irvine is regarded with a combination of veneration and awe here. Grown men will speak in hushed tones about the day they saw him racing around Kirkistown in the very infancy of his career. Even then there was a brashness and a self-confidence that set him apart. Irvine has always been different and that difference is rooted in the way that his personality is so untypical of this place where he was born and brought up. Ostentation, success and cockiness are traditionally viewed with a healthy degree of scepticism in this part of the island. It is why we much prefer our gaelic footballers to trot back quietly to their posting after a goal and why we hate them blowing kisses to the crowd. And it is why there will always be a place for the lumbering Iain Dowie on the Northern Ireland team while the infinitely more gifted and more erratic Keith Gillespie struggles to worm his way into anyone's affections. Steadiness sells because it makes everyone feel more comfortable about themselves.
But park a man in the cockpit of a fast car and all that scepticism is swiftly blown away. When Irvine drops in little snippets about nipping off somewhere in his jet, about a jaunt in his helicopter or spending the week on his yacht in Monte Carlo nobody seems to care. It is at his point that you start to realise there are some sportsmen (and it usually is men, but that's another day's work) who clearly operate in a parallel universe where the cars are always fast and the jets or helicopters are always sitting just outside the front door. There is an other-worldliness about the glimpses that we get of their lifestyles that appears to have never-ending appeal. We dip into it for a while and enjoy the ride but are always reassured in the knowledge that we can jump off again whenever we want.
Eddie Irvine is the first playboy sportstar the North has had in 30 years. Not since the days of Best have we had a figure who has been able to transcend his particular sporting field and move on to a much more elevated plane. The competition, admittedly, has not been particularly stiff. Denis Taylor or Pat Jennings were never going to set the international gossip columns alight. Irvine's nearest local predecessor in Formula One was John Watson. His principal failing was that he was never successful enough to pull off the playboy trick with any degree of panache. Irvine is on a different level.
BUT there are also times when you don't wonder if it is just a lot of bluff and bravado. Irvine is usually at his most obnoxious before races when he at times paints himself as the greatest driver who has ever drawn breath.
This was most noticeable in the last fortnight when with Michael Schumacher marooned in plaster, Irvine has assumed the Ferrari throne. He was under pressure and the way his reaction was to talk himself up and exorcise some of the demons that he has stored while playing second fiddle. His approach is a scattergun one and if you happen to cross his path then you're going to get hit.
Afterwards, though, more of the real man starts to emerge. His post-race musings last Sunday were laced with unfamiliar passages of humility and admissions of self-doubt. Yes, he was worried that he might crumple under the weight of expectation and yes, he had been concerned that all the pressure might get to him. This was a more human Irvine and a more likeable Irvine.
The contradictions are always likely to encourage ambivalence. But just when you decide that you have had enough of the ego and of the self-absorption, Eddie Irvine redeems himself and stops you from going over to the other side to join forces with the detractors. Who else, bathing in the warm afterglow of Sunday's victory would have recounted an old story about one of his begrudgers saying he would never make a racing driver ["]as long as he's got a hole in his arse["]. As we sat around on Sunday evening chewing over news of his win we felt a strange sort of communal pride. It might have been self-delusion on a grand scale, but for a few minutes Eddie Irvine felt like one of us. One of our own - warts, weaknesses and all - taking on the world. It must be a boy thing.
